GLADIO

Opening

On 24 October 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti told the Chamber of Deputies that Italy had run a secret armed network since the 1950s. It was called Gladio, "the sword," and it was the Italian branch of a system of stay-behind organizations built across Western Europe with the CIA and coordinated through NATO committees. Its official job was to wait for a Soviet invasion and then fight behind the lines. The admission came because a Venetian magistrate, Felice Casson, had found the network's paperwork in the military intelligence archives while investigating a car bomb that killed three police officers in 1972.

That the network existed is settled. What it did in peacetime, and whether any part of it helped the far right bomb Italian civilians during the 1970s, is the question that thirty years of trials and parliamentary inquiries have narrowed but not closed.

Timeline

Late 1940s to early 1950sThe US and Britain begin organizing covert stay-behind cells in Western European countries: arms dumps, radio operators, escape lines, and trained reservists meant to activate after an invasion. NATO's Clandestine Planning Committee coordinates national networks from 1951.

26 November 1956Italy's military intelligence service, SIFAR, and the CIA sign the agreement that formally sets up the Italian network, under Defence Minister Paolo Taviani. Arms caches are buried around the country, most of them in the north-east facing Yugoslavia.

12 December 1969A bomb at the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana, Milan, kills seventeen people. Police blame anarchists. Suspicion later moves to the neo-fascist group Ordine Nuovo. The bombing opens the "years of lead."

31 May 1972A booby-trapped Fiat 500 near Peteano, in Friuli, kills three Carabinieri. Investigators first pursue left-wing militants.

1984Vincenzo Vinciguerra, an Ordine Nuovo member, confesses to Peteano and receives a life sentence. He says the attack was covered up by people inside the state and describes a hidden structure that recruited militants for anti-communist violence.

1990Casson, who has reopened Peteano, gets access to SISMI's archives and finds documents on the stay-behind network.

August 1990Andreotti tells the parliamentary commission on terrorism that such a structure exists and promises a full report.

24 October 1990Andreotti's report goes to Parliament. It describes Gladio as a structure "of information, response and safeguard," lists 622 civilian members, says the arms caches were recovered years earlier, and states that Gladio played no part in the bombings.

November 1990The European Parliament passes a resolution condemning the secret networks and calling for inquiries in every member state. Belgium opens a parliamentary inquiry into its own network. Switzerland exposes a similar organization, P-26. Other governments, including Britain, decline to give details.

2001At a Milan trial of neo-fascists over Piazza Fontana, former counter-intelligence chief General Gianadelio Maletti testifies that the CIA wanted to stop Italy's drift to the left and "may have" used right-wing terrorism to do it.

2005Italy's Court of Cassation rules that the Piazza Fontana bomb came from an Ordine Nuovo cell. The men it names, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, had already been acquitted and could not be retried.

Key figures

Giulio Andreotti made the admission. He also served as Defence Minister in the 1960s and 70s, when the network was active, so the man describing Gladio to Parliament had been responsible for it.

Felice Casson, the Venice magistrate, found the paperwork. The disclosure came out of a murder investigation, not a government decision to open up.

Vincenzo Vinciguerra is a convicted bomber who described the hidden structure six years before the government confirmed it. His account is detailed and consistent, but he has his own reasons to shift blame onto the state.

Gianadelio Maletti is the most senior official to link American intelligence to right-wing terrorism under oath. His 2001 testimony was hedged: he said the CIA may have used the far right. He did not say Gladio planted a bomb.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources: Andreotti's October 1990 report, the SISMI documents Casson found, the European Parliament's resolution of November 1990, the Belgian and Swiss parliamentary reports, and decades of Italian court records on Peteano and Piazza Fontana.

The weak point is a document from the other direction. A US Army manual known as FM 30-31B, which appears to order allied intelligence services to stage attacks and blame the left, is widely cited in Gladio literature. The US government has called it a Soviet forgery since it surfaced in the 1970s, and no original has ever been authenticated. Any account that relies on it inherits that problem.

A structure of information, response and safeguard.

Things you might not know

• Andreotti counted the weapons caches. He told parliament that 127 of the network's caches had been dismantled.
• It trained at a secret base in Sardinia. Gladio's training and operational command was based at Capo Marrargiu, near Alghero, officially the Centro Addestramento Guastatori, a saboteurs' training centre.
• The initials hid a joke. The base was known as CAG, and an Unità report in 1990 noted that the last word of its name was said to be interchangeable with "gladiatori".
• The base kept a guest book. When magistrates seized its records in 1990, they reportedly found lists of trainees, some with foreign names, and a visitors' register signed by prominent guests.
• A president said he helped build it. Francesco Cossiga, a Sardinian who served as Italy's president, admitted being involved in creating Gladio in the years after the Second World War.

Competing explanations

A legitimate military contingency plan with a few bad actors inside it. The network was built to resist an invasion, and its members were mostly reservists who never did anything. Individual neo-fascists who crossed paths with it acted on their own.

A tool of the "strategy of tension." Some intelligence officers used the network's people, weapons, or protection to support right-wing bombings that were then blamed on the left, to frighten voters away from the Communist Party. Vinciguerra's confession, the cover-up around Peteano, and Maletti's testimony point this way.

A real network whose role has been overstated. Italian courts have convicted neo-fascists and intelligence officers of misleading investigations, but no court has convicted Gladio as an organization of any attack. Historians who read the wider record, including Daniele Ganser's 2005 book NATO's Secret Armies and its critics, disagree mainly on how far the pattern of cover-ups can be read as a plan.

Later life of the case

Gladio is now the standard example people reach for when arguing that a Western government secretly ran an armed network, and it gets used to back up much weaker claims. The underlying files are uneven: Italy and Belgium published a great deal, and most other NATO countries, including the UK and US, have released little about their own stay-behind networks.

Finding

Gladio was real. A head of government confirmed it to Parliament, and Italian and Belgian records back it up. Intelligence officers covered for right-wing bombers in the Peteano and Piazza Fontana investigations, and courts have said so. What has never been established in court is that Gladio as a network ordered or carried out an attack.

What still will not resolve: the full member lists and operational records of the stay-behind networks outside Italy and Belgium, and a document, not testimony, that ties the network's command to a specific bombing.